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Podium at the Hilton Park Lane

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Cuisine: Modern European

22 Park Lane, W1K 1BE


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Phone: 020 7208 4022

Open: Mon-Sun 7am-11pm (Sun -10.30pm)

 

 

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A Podium for losers

 

Soul-less sister: While the Hilton's top-floor restaurant is to die for, with sky-high prices to match, the new ground floor eaterie, Podium, fails to ignite the senses

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• Let them eat bread

There's a highly reputed restaurant at the Hilton on Park Lane. It's at the very top - Galvin at Windows on the 28th floor. From here, you can see the fabulous view back over Hyde Park and the Serpentine and, if you time it right, take in a great London sunset - whereas, if you come up here hoping to cop the view a bit more cheaply from the astonishingly naff bar, you'll be restricted to looking the other way, over the rooftops and air vents of Mayfair.

Despite the sky-high prices, the food at this joint is good enough for it to have been rated one of the restaurants of the year by Fay Maschler when it opened in 2006. And it has a third attraction too - the great advantage of being one of the few places near the park where you can't see the beastly building you're in.

Let us name the guilty men, however obscure: this grim skyscaper was designed by William B Tabler Architects of New York, a firm that has perpetrated some 400 hotels around the world. On its own website, resorting to awed italics and capitalisation, the practice explains its key design principle thus: "A hotel must earn a Profit out of its building." No drivel about beauty there, then.

The Hilton on Park Lane was completed in 1963. Only Basil Spence's 33-storey Hyde Park Barracks, erected in 1970, outdoes it as an affront to the eye, in much the same vein of concrete cretinism. It feels like being a collaborator in crimes against the skyline to come to the Hilton hoping for a good time. But needs must when the devil drives.

Even for those astride mighty expense accounts, the top-floor restaurant is just too much in every sense for regular use, as well as being too small to cater for the tower's 450 rooms. So the hotel has to provide a more basic level of re-fuelling that, nonetheless, will reassure its clientele that they have remained in the lap of international luxury. Hence Podium, very much on the ground floor, as its name so helpfully hints.

The room, previously the Park Brasserie, has been given a £500,000 refit to designs by the Manser Practice, who did Sketch and the Great Eastern, as well as extending the Hiltons at Gatwick and Heathrow. And a new head chef has arrived, Marvin Jones, who worked previously for Gary Rhodes.

On the evening we tried, there was scarcely anybody else there. The lighting was dim, the wallpaper moderne floral, the flooring a mixture of parquet and carpet, disheartening hotel jazz blared out, there was a strange internal pergola adorned with spotlights, and our table was unsteady. More interestingly, rubbergloved cleaners were trying hard to remove a large red stain from the nearby beigey banquette - the remains of a wine misadventure or an exploding raspberry coulis, we hoped, rather than a mob slaying.

Some of the fodder on offer here is pretty basic. The Hilton burger with bacon or cheese at £15.50, grills such as steak at £25 and chicken at £20, regally accompanied by chips, tomatoes and mushrooms. But there's also more ambitious food.

From the starters, warm pheasant boudin served with leek and thyme, at £11.50, proved a slightly obscene looking sausage with a mild flavour, hardly tasting of game at all, and a soft and moussey, over-processed texture. It came aimlessly surrounded by a dribble of sticky, massively over-reduced meaty juice.

Wild mushrooms on toasted brioche, £9.80, also featured this gunge which tasted like a determined effort to show Bovril who's boss. A mixture of fungi, including plenty of the not-so-feral oyster mushroom, sitting on some spinach, had been liberally doused in superfluous cream, making the sweet bun unpleasantly soggy. My comrade-in-arms (understandably preoccupied by an appointment later that evening to talk live on Radio 3 about Fanny Burney) couldn't finish this dish.

Pan-fried sea-bream, marinated oysters, cucumber and carrot, £18.50, delivered a nice piece of well-judged fish, sitting, however, on large ribbons of quite cold carrot and cucumber, among which was to be found an unhelpfully pickled oyster. Roasted monkfish with cabbage and smoked bacon, £23, was a single huge chunk of fish on the bone, therefore emerging dry and overcooked, accompanied by a torched slice of bacon. Both dishes again featured highly reduced jus ornamenting, or polluting, the plate.

A gooseberry brulé, £7.50, was a huge serving: a well-made crème brulée, atop some gooseberry purée, though the fruit is hardly in season in December. But the selection of English cheeses, pear and quince chutney, was miserly - four tiny pieces stretched out over a long plate, accompanied by an unpleasant blob of over-cloved chutney.

The wine is expensive, opening at £22.50 for an Italian or Spanish red and Chilean white. Even if you order a glass, they bring the bottle to the table and go through the approval rigmarolea pantomime in the case of screwtops. With two bottles of water and four glasses of modest wine, the bill, including service, came to £127.86.

It seems unlikely that anybody not staying at the Hilton would be fool enough to eat here. The waitresses seemed startled that I didn't have a room number and they were right.

What's genuinely sad is to think that any visitors to London, however fleeting their stay, however exhausted and disoriented they may be, should dine here either, when, for the same money, they could sample what Rowley Leigh has to offer at Le Café Anglais on the other side of the park. Or, for less, they could try out a classy gastropub, such as The Only Running Footman in Mayfair.

But then again, while we all live together in a world bursting with sin and sorrow, maybe there's no great need to sympathise with those who come to London and choose to stay and dine in an international hotel chain.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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